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Saturday, December 12, 2015

An Interesting Observation at the Mahidol Sports Science 10k

Sometimes your morning can start out looking a bit like this. I would say that I look like someone who got up way too early to go to a sport that I don't think anyone likes, but you can just translate that to "looking like hell."

I have had the opportunity to run many, many kilometers around the beautiful Mahidol University, and today was no different. It was a beautiful run and I enjoyed it a lot. It was a somewhat similar route to what I have run before in these two different blog posts. Post 1. Post 2.

While the run was very pretty, (see the pictures below), it was a realization that I had that made it very memorable.

At the start of the race, the woman next to me was running in a hijab. While normally, I might not find this all that interesting, with all the anti-muslim rhetoric going on in the United States right now, I found it quite nice that this woman was able to keep to her traditions and still join in on non-traditional activity. She wore a very conservative set of running clothes (long sleeve athletic shirt and long running pants), and was able to compete in a sport that one would not think typical of a person wearing a traditional head covering.

Needless to say, I loved seeing her doing this. I am quite used to see lots of women in hijab here in Thailand, as there is a large population of Muslims here, but it was great to see someone who was able to mix the old and the new.